Hi Dave, I've been gathering the energy to answer your questions. I finally feel up to it today. Sorry for the delay!
I'm sure loads of us would like to hear more about this, so I'm asking. No rush though.
All this happened long before my time, but this is some of what I know from relatives -
Karl, my grandmother's uncle, was known for being able to do practical things like predict the weather (which was important in a farming community), blood-stopping and curing minor illness, as well as more unusual abilities. According to my grandmother, he was known to have predicted World War 1 (although that would have been before her time) and my own mother recalls, when she was very young, being there when he predicted the outbreak of World War 2. She said that he made this prediction based on the patterns and colors in the sky. He died not too long afterwards, so this is one of her few memories of him.
He was known to have seen a UFO, a glowing shape hovering in the sky above the fields. This was before airplanes had even been invented, certainly before the 20th century UFO flaps began. Interestingly, there are still UFO sightings in that area today.
My grandmother and great-aunts said that he had an unusual affect on people. Back in those days, there were dance halls, where the people from the scattered farming communities would gather to drink and dance on weekends. Sometimes fighting would break out, and then someone would run to get Karl. They said that when he'd walk in, the crowd would part like the red sea. He'd just walk up to the fighting drunks and lay hands on them, and they'd slump over as if all the fight had gone out of them. I suppose this effect was a bit like one might see at a faith-healing.
In their village at one point, there were also problems with drunken violence. People shooting up the houses and beating their wives - that sort of thing. The details are hazy now, but my great-aunt said that Karl took a certain book - a spell book of some type - and buried it on (IIRC) a night of the full moon, and (also IIRC) stuck a pocket knife into the ground at the spot, I suppose to fix the spell in place. The violence came to an end after that.
According to both my grandmother and one of her sisters, when they were about 10 and 11 they went out for a ride out in Karl's model T. Again, this was way out in the country, where you wouldn't expect to see many other cars even today, and especially not then. The model T broke down, and the girls were panicked because they were so far from home. Karl told them not to worry, he would have someone (another relative of theirs) come out to help. The girls were confused by this, as how could this be possible? They said that Karl was cagey about this, just smiling and telling them to wait and see. Soon, said relative pulls up behind them in his car, gets out and proceeds to fix the Model T, without a word. They said that was the weirdest thing, that he didn't speak a word, just looked as if he were in a trance the whole time. Then he just got back in his car and drove home. Grandmother and great-aunt credited this to Karl's uncanny power over people.
The flat-out weirdest story that I can remember, one that even I find hard to credit (but the women swore up and down was true) is about what happened at the tank. The girls were around 10 to 14 at this time, so this must have been in the 1920's. There was a tank on their farm, that is to say, a watering hole. One day they went for a swim. Uncle Karl called out for them to look, then just marched straight out to the middle of the tank, on
top of the water.
The girls thought it was a neat trick, so they swam over to find out how he'd done it. They swam underneath him to find out what he was standing on, but there was nothing. They grabbed his feet, but they couldn't pull him down. He just stood there laughing. He would never tell his secret, either, just laugh!
For years, various family members have tried to figure out how he might have pulled this off outside of something supernatural. Even if he could have acquired the materials to create such a trick, the sticking point is that the girls could feel the soles of his old work boots from beneath the water. That leaves out optical illusions as well.
Knowing those women, I believe they told the story as they experienced it. They were not at all inclined to lie or make up tall tales. They were sturdy, practical country women who knew BS when they saw it. They only had basic educations, but they were all intelligent. They were certainly convinced something strange had happened at the tank that day.
Later, when I read the Carlos Castaneda books, this story made me think of something Don Juan would have done.
Who did you sedate and under what circumstances?
LOL, well, I'm not quite as good as a horse tranquilizer, but it came about like this:
The town where I used to live had an unusually high rate of mental illness and homelessness, both. Someone did a study and found it was 30 percent higher than other similarly-sized counties. There were myriad reasons for this, but
it was not unheard of to come across someone wandering around in the midst of a psychotic break.
Were we lived at the time, it also wasn't uncommon for people who were unwell to pass through, especially since we were near a hospital with the only psych ward in town. We might hear a ruckus outside and there was someone having a freak-out in the courtyard. I very often felt compelled to comfort them and try to find someone who could help. I was often successful at this, but figured it was because I knew how to talk to them.
However, other people began to mention that the disturbed people were going calm when I touched them. Soon, other people were calling me to come calm someone down. I began to think about what people said about Uncle Karl.
I felt this was confirmed when for a while I took up palm-reading. (This was supposed to be a lark, but didn't turn out that way.) When reading someone's palm, they would often mention that my touch was making them feel relaxed, chilled-out or sleepy. One person said it was as if they'd taken a muscle relaxer. Perhaps I'm just that boring, but maybe it's the same trait of Uncle Karl's.
BTW, I gave up palm reading because I didn't like what I was seeing. It's not like tarot, it's not as mutable. I saw death in one man's palm and didn't know how to handle it. I told him to look after his health and keep up with his doctor's advice, but he died anyway. I felt I shouldn't be seeing these things if there is nothing I can do to help.
Again, I would love to know anything that has happened to these two fellows in respect of 'pulling things in'.
I've got to go out for a bit, but will answer this question when I get back.